Can Iran Change?

High stakes in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reëlection campaign.

Ahmadinejad’s humble origins provoke disdain among Iran’s political élite, but they are a formidable electoral asset. His 2005 Presidential campaign captured sixty-two per cent of the electorate. Photograph by Thomas Dworzak.Credit MAGNUM

Ever since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad first ran for President of Iran, four years ago, he has shown a canny understanding of communications. He has a blog, called Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Personal Memos, in which he expounds on God, philosophy, and his childhood, and answers e-mails from readers. The signature videos for his 2005 Presidential campaign were two thirty-minute productions that expertly portrayed him as a man of the people. In one scene, Ahmadinejad is in line for lunch at a self-service canteen; in another, he walks among the poor. The videos were aired on television repeatedly. The campaign tagline was “It’s doable—and we can do it.”

The videos were conceived and produced by Javad Shamaqdari, a burly, bearded man who is the President’s “art adviser.” A month ago, that meant demanding an apology from Hollywood for “thirty years of insults and accusations against Iran.” Shamaqdari cited the 2006 film “300,” about the battle between the Spartans and the evil, decadent Persians, and last year’s “The Wrestler,” in which Mickey Rourke grapples with an old nemesis called the Ayatollah, who tries to choke Rourke’s character with an Iranian flag. On the campaign, though, Shamaqdari’s role was like that of an American communications director.

Shamaqdari and Ahmadinejad met when they were engineering students in Tehran, in the late seventies. During the Iran-Iraq War, Shamaqdari produced documentaries about life on the front. He went on to make feature films, including “Sandstorm,” about the failed 1980 U.S. operation to rescue the hostages. Shamaqdari said that when Ahmadinejad became mayor of Tehran, in 2003, he refused his municipal salary, keeping only what he was due in his position as a university teacher. “I felt that Iran needed a person like that at the top,” Shamaqdari said. “So when I heard of his candidacy I proposed to help him.”

Shamaqdari showed me outtakes from his films—scenes that Ahmadinejad had found “too intimate.” They portrayed Ahmadinejad tenderly kissing his aged father on the cheeks and reciting Persian poetry to him. “What I wanted to show was his honesty and his simplicity,” Shamaqdari said. “I felt sure the Iranian people would vote for him if they saw this.”

Shamaqdari was right. Iran’s conservative clerical establishment, led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, had thwarted the efforts of President Mohammad Khatami, who had run as a reformist, to open up Iran. The clerics rallied around Ahmadinejad’s dark-horse candidacy, and in June, 2005, Ahmadinejad won, with sixty-two per cent of the vote.

Iran’s next Presidential election is scheduled to take place in June. Ahmadinejad has declared his candidacy; Khatami was a candidate, too, before dropping out in March in favor of another reformist, former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Once again, Iran’s conservatives will face the country’s putative reformers. And Ahmadinejad is again counting on his populist appeal.

Shamaqdari repeated the stories, which I heard several times in Tehran, of how Ahmadinejad had rolled up the antique Persian carpets in the Presidential palace and sent them to a carpet museum; how he refused the V.I.P. seat on the Presidential plane; how he had wanted to continue living in his modest family home in Tehran, until his security advisers had prevailed and he moved. “Not into the Presidential palace, though,” Shamaqdari said. “Into a normal building in a secluded area.” Ahmadinejad is offering voters cash handouts, called “justice shares,” which are reportedly the equivalent of sixty dollars.

Many people within Iran’s political establishment privately disdain Ahmadinejad, precisely because of his background. “He’d only travelled outside Iran once before he came to power, and that was just to Iraq for a couple of days,” one former diplomat said. A European diplomat said that a senior Iranian official had confided to him that before Ahmadinejad became President he was the sort of man whom the official would have kept waiting for thirty minutes outside his office, just to put him in his place.

Still, to dismiss Ahmadinejad as a rube is to misunderstand him. He is a populist along the lines of Hugo Chávez, of Venezuela, a politician who knows that his country is full of people like him, and knows how to speak to them. Ahmadinejad is, for some of his supporters, a throwback to the ideological verities of the first years of the Islamic Republic, when Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini reigned, and teen-age boys volunteered to be martyrs. For many Iranians, Ahmadinejad’s promise of restoring Iran’s “rightful place” in the world—and providing subsidies and jobs—holds great appeal.

Ahmadinejad’s pursuit of a nuclear program taps into this nationalism, and has broad support among Iranians. “What they want is respect,” Lee Hamilton, the former congressman and co-chair of the Iraq Study Group, who has been an influential voice on U.S.-Iran policy, said. “And the best way they thought to get it was to master the nuclear fuel cycle.”

But, in the four years since Ahmadinejad first ran for President, Iran and its rivals have changed: Iranians have been hit hard by the world economic crisis and by falling oil prices; Iran is significantly closer to becoming a nuclear power; and George W. Bush has been replaced by Barack Obama. The question now is how Ahmadinejad will deal with pressure at home and from a new, more subtle Administration in Washington.

On March 20th, the start of the Persian New Year, Obama recorded a video addressed to the Iranian people, in which he spoke respectfully of Iran’s ancient culture and offered “honest” engagement. Ayatollah Khamenei responded to the video by saying that “words are not enough,” and that the United States must change its policies if it expects Iran to do the same. Then, on March 31st, at a conference on Afghanistan in The Hague, Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special representative, struck up a conversation with Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister. Both sides downplayed the encounter—“It was cordial, unplanned, and they agreed to stay in touch,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said—but in terms of direct contact it was a first.

In the Bush years, it was easy for Ahmadinejad to argue that President Bush was not interested in anything but a hostile relationship with Iran. Obama’s message was “a game-changer,” Vali Nasr, an expert on Iran and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said. “Now the U.S. has come out with an extraordinarily different kind of message, one that is warm, and seems sincere about engaging with Iran. So the Iranians now will ask of their government, why aren’t you engaging?” Nasr added, “Obama has cleverly created a debate between the Iranian people and their leaders, and within the leadership itself—and also, because this comes just three months before the elections, made it a campaign issue.”

The election presents a dilemma for members of the Obama Administration. If they appear to bend too much, Ahmadinejad could argue that he has successfully stood up to the United States, strengthening him at the polls. The Americans “don’t want to do anything that helps Ahmadinejad before the election,” Sir Kieran Prendergast, the U.N.’s former Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, who has dealt extensively with Iran, said. But there are risks in waiting, too: Ahmadinejad could win without any help; or a reformist victory could put the clerics on the defensive, making them more determined to block a deal with America. “There are hard-liners on both sides who would like to see any opening to Iran fail,” Prendergast said. Nasr added, “We cannot read the tea leaves as to who will win the election—that is a risky game to play.”

Lee Hamilton said that the United States could not afford to delay a decision in the hope that Ahmadinejad might be replaced with someone preferable. “We are preparing to begin discussions on a wide range of issues, and we know where we want to go on it,” he said. “We should proceed on our own timetable, not theirs.” He added, “Obama wants to put the relationship on a better and more sustained basis, as do I. Ever since the Revolution, we’ve had this debate here about whether to engage or not, and never resolved it. Now it’s not whether we are going to engage but how.

“I don’t know that there’s another country in the world that’s caused us more heartburn than Iran over the past few decades,” Hamilton went on. “You have to recognize that we have a long list of grievances against Iran—and so does Iran, with us.”

Ahmadinejad seems to delight in his role as a diplomatic provocateur—dismissing the Holocaust as “a myth,” calling for the end of Israel’s “Zionist regime,” and bragging about the progress being made in Iran’s nuclear program. He is fifty-two and tiny—about five feet tall—and very thin. He wears a perpetual five-day growth of beard, a sign of devoutness. His eyes are unusually small and black, like raisins, and deep-set. From a distance, this can make him seem remote, even blind. In front of large groups, Ahmadinejad is demagogic and unsmiling—an unhappy warrior—pointing his finger and shaking his fists. In more intimate settings, he projects an almost inappropriate joyousness. He speaks in circular loops about good and evil, East and West, God and man, but in his meandering riffs, always elusive in their logic, there is something Chauncey Gardinerish, as if he were in over his head.

This winter, President Rafael Correa, of Ecuador, a protégé of Chávez, came to Tehran to sign a number of trade deals. At the ceremony, Correa, a big man, arranged himself on a sofa in an expansive, loose-limbed way. Ahmadinejad looked scrawny beside him; he wore a cardigan and a rumpled gray suit. He smiled at odd moments, and seemed awkward, unsure of what to say. They were like a mismatched bride and groom in an arranged marriage. Correa struck all the right notes for a foreign leader hopeful of obtaining financial credits from Iran. “We consider Iranians a heroic people who knew how to rid themselves of a bloody dictatorship that was backed by the West,” he said. “This example inspires us in Latin America.” Looking pleased, Ahmadinejad turned to Correa, embraced him, and exclaimed, “I’ve found a new friend, and I am not going to lose him now.”

I first encountered Ahmadinejad not long after he became President, during a session of the U.N. General Assembly, when he hosted a breakfast at his New York hotel with American academics and journalists. Ahmadinejad was fidgety, his eyes darting around. He began by reciting some verses from the Koran and then, as his most senior aides looked on with deadpan expressions, he spoke obscurely about “problems of identity and morality in Europe,” concluding with a litany of rhetorical questions: “What are the root causes of our problems? What is the solution? What does the current trend lead toward?” These, confoundingly, were Ahmadinejad’s talking points for the morning.

Someone asked about Iran’s crackdown on academic freedoms and the media. “You see, in Iran, the freedom is a very privileged freedom,” Ahmadinejad replied. “Just as you’d arrest a man for traffic violations, there must be social laws. . . . We have to become clean human beings. Man has to keep moving along a sublime path.” He then talked about justice, and said that a great wrong had been done to the Palestinians in the name of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, which, after all, had occurred in Europe. “More research, clearly, is needed,” he said, referring to the slaughter of European Jews. “Why don’t we allow more investigation into this?” Ahmadinejad looked around the room, and smiled.

There was a question about a fatwa that Ayatollah Khamenei had issued in 2005, ruling that the “production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam and that the Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons”—although Iran has, in defiance of the international community, inexorably expanded its nuclear potential. Ahmadinejad replied that the Supreme Leader’s fatwa expressed all that needed to be said about Iran’s intentions: “One of the things that characterize Iranian diplomacy is its transparency. We are very clear.”

How much power Ahmadinejad actually wields in the complex structure of the Iranian state is not transparent at all. There is no one more powerful than Ayatollah Khamenei, who has been Supreme Leader, the country’s paramount religious and political authority and the commander-in-chief of its armed forces, since Khomeini’s death, in 1989. Ahmadinejad requires the approval of the Majlis, or parliament, to pass laws; Khamenei can issue a fatwa. After his election, Ahmadinejad publicly kissed Khamenei’s hand, demonstrating his fealty. Hossein Shariatmadari, who is the Supreme Leader’s representative and the editor of Kayhan, the newspaper of the clerical establishment, said, “Mr. Ahmadinejad, you know, is only the head of the implementation in Iran.”

Their relationship is more complicated than that. On one visit I made to Tehran, with Iraq’s President Jalal Talabani, in December, 2006, Iraqi officials who were present for the highest-level meetings told me that Ahmadinejad had been deferential with the Supreme Leader, but that the two men clearly worked closely together. One of Talabani’s senior aides recounted a significant moment. Talabani had given a blunt assessment of the situation in Iraq; at the time, Shiite-Sunni sectarian killings were at their height, and Iranian-backed militias were heavily involved. As Talabani described the violence, Khamenei repeatedly exclaimed, “Oh, how terrible! We are praying for you.” Finally, Talabani interrupted him: “What we need is not prayers, we need medicine.” Khamenei replied, “I will provide the prayers and he”—he gestured to Ahmadinejad—“will provide the medicine.”

“We can guess ourselves silly about the intricacies of Iranian politics,” Lee Hamilton said, “but we will never really know the truth.” Vali Nasr added, “Even Khamenei’s authority is constrained by a whole web of relationships.”

Thomas Pickering, a former Under-Secretary of State, who has been meeting with Iranians in an effort to help formulate a new U.S. policy approach, said, “In talking with the Iranians for several years, we have discovered that it’s difficult to know for certain the Iranians’ internal political architecture. There’s no way to have the tight intelligence to know when the right or wrong time to try talking with them might be. With the opacity of their system, it’s always going to be a kind of crapshoot.”

Mohammad Khatami, Ahmadinejad’s predecessor and rival, is a religious moderate, and thus, in Iranian terms, a reformist. That is the usual formulation. But what does it really mean? There exists a bewildering array of definitions for political types in Iran. They range from hard-line religious conservatives, represented by Ahmadinejad, to religious pragmatists, to religious reformists. “Reformist” is a relative term. No one in Iranian politics is talking openly about separation of church and state, for example, or even contemplating it seriously. When I spoke to Khatami recently, he said that Iran could have “democracy, human rights, and all the freedoms that we want,” but only in an Islamic “moral framework.”

Khatami wavered for months over whether to run in this year’s Presidential race, an indecisiveness that frustrated his followers. He had said from the beginning that if Mir-Hossein Mousavi ran he would drop out, and he did so after five weeks. Mousavi, who is sixty-seven, served as Prime Minister from 1981 to 1989, but then withdrew from politics for more than a decade, after losing a political battle with Ayatollah Khamenei. (One commentator, remarking on Mousavi’s return, called him “the Persian Cincinnatus.”) What most Iranians remember about him is that he managed an effective rationing system during the Iran-Iraq War, keeping families supplied with basic goods despite severe shortages. Mousavi emerged from the milieu of Iran’s radical left, the members of the revolutionary generation who joined with the clerics to oust the Shah, and were hostile to the West and free-market economics. “Many of the people who became reformists were at the beginning leftist Islamists,” Nasr said. Mousavi is aligned with the reformists and, because of his quarrels with Khamenei and his reputation as a manager, is considered one himself—someone who is willing to challenge the theocrats. But his past makes him relatively appealing to Iran’s clerics and to the Revolutionary Guards; they do not despise him, as they do Khatami.

The reformist camp apparently calculated that Mousavi had the best chance of winning. (Another moderate candidate, Mehdi Karroubi, has a mostly rural base.) And there were concerns for Khatami’s safety; he was almost beaten up by a mob of hard-liners two days after he announced he would run, and an editorial in Kayhan, Shariatmadari’s paper, suggested that he might suffer the same fate as Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in 2007. The campaign was going to be ugly, and, according to Nasr, “Khatami is not suited for that sort of thing.”

This winter, Khatami received me in the mansion that houses his foundation, in the Tehran suburb of Niavaran, a neighborhood of stone villas on large forested plots, right up against the scree of the Elburz Mountains. He immediately said that he had tried hard, during his two terms as President, to improve relations with America and spoke about his government’s behind-the-scenes support for the U.S. campaign to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, after the September 11th attacks. “Then the neocons came and destroyed everything,” Khatami said. “I think we have all learned good lessons. Obama has now come with promises of change. And we have a chance of improving relations again, but only if, one, Obama distances himself from the warmongers who are present in both parties, and, two, distances himself from the attitudes of Bush—in other words, the U.S.A. as a Big Brother. Instead, the U.S.A. should be a big friend. And, as well, if he reduces the influence of the Zionist lobby.”

Khatami continued, “I am a child of the Revolution, you know. I was involved from the very beginning, with Ayatollah Khomeini. We knew that there had been changes in the world, in science and technology, and that we could not ignore these things. And Iran also needed its independence. Iran has had a great civilization. We religious intellectuals thought we could achieve all of this—that we could achieve modernity and be Islamists, too.” Khatami paused, and said, “We were very different from those who want to take the world backward. . . . The destiny of Islam depends on the outcome of this—Islam that can bring dialogue and logic instead of terrorism, and actually contribute things to the world. I think that’s what Iranians want. And I think that’s what Imam Khomeini wanted, too.”

Many Iranians are not particularly anti-American, or especially concerned with politics. But Ahmadinejad is the product and the defender of a deeply ingrained strain in Iran’s political culture, which tends, historically, toward absolutism. Khomeini and his fellow-clerics scorned the imperial trappings of the Shah’s regime but shared his belief in Iran’s past and future glory—its Persian exceptionalism. Iranian society today is characterized by an unreconciled mixture of religious nationalism and everyday pragmatism. Xenophobia is coupled with a sense of entitlement. The state is a chimera: an Islamic theocracy wedded to a regime chosen in heavily contested (if not entirely free) elections, in a globalized economy. The election this summer will help determine whether Iran’s fractures—at home and abroad—can be repaired through moderation and compromise, or whether the regime will continue to sustain itself through coercion.

Shariatmadari, the Supreme Leader’s representative, said that he had no doubt that Ahmadinejad would be reëlected. “He has a special place among the masses—especially among the masses,” he said. “Others will come against him, but none can compete with Ahmadinejad.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was born in October, 1956, in Aradan, a small town situated on a mean-looking stretch of windblown desert sixty miles southeast of Tehran. It is scorching hot in summer and frigid in winter. There are no seasons in between. Mahmoud was the fourth of seven children, and was still a baby when his father, Ahmad, who had a grocery shop in Aradan, moved the family to Tehran—part of a wave of Iranians from the countryside who came to the cities, looking for a better life. As an adjunct to the move, his father changed the family name, from Saborjhian, meaning “thread painter,” one of the lowliest jobs in Iran’s carpet-making industry, to Ahmadinejad, which can mean “race of Muhammad” or “virtuous race.”

The family settled in Narmak, a working-class district in south Tehran. Ahmadinejad’s father started up an ironmongery there, making wrought-iron grilles for doors and windows. Ahmadinejad still owns the family home, a modest two-story brick house squeezed between larger buildings. In 1980, when he was twenty-four, he married a fellow-student, Azam al-Sadat Farahi, and she joined the family there. (They have two sons and a daughter.) When I visited Narmak, guards patrolled the approaches to the house, and a group of boys kicked a soccer ball around in the street. On the curbside was a wooden hut where several young men collected petitions and complaints. Ahmadinejad had instituted the system when he was Tehran’s mayor; about two hundred letters were collected every day, which were sorted and sent on to an office that dealt with them.

Nasser Hadian, a professor of political science at Tehran University, grew up with Ahmadinejad in Narmak. Hadian described him to me as a good student who worked hard and excelled in science—a square. “Parents liked their children to be friends with him,” Hadian said. For teen-agers in the Tehran of the Shah’s era, they had both been fairly conservative. “We were clean, we weren’t chasing girls, drinking, or smoking hashish.”

After graduating from high school, Ahmadinejad enrolled in the Iran University of Science and Technology and continued living at home. Hadian’s parents sent him to study medicine at San Jacinto College, in Texas. There he switched his major to sociology, and became caught up in Islam and politics; in Tehran, Ahmadinejad was, too. “We began exchanging letters and we had the habit of beginning them ‘In the Name of God, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate,’ ” Hadian said. “My parents were shocked when they discovered this, and urged me to stop studying sociology, which they thought was influencing me. They were right.”

Hadian said that he and Ahmadinejad were profoundly affected by Ali Shariati, a French-educated Iranian philosopher who adapted Marxism and anti-colonialist theory to a new understanding of Islam and the “sociology of religion.” Shariati met with Jean-Paul Sartre, translated Frantz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth” into Farsi, and propounded a kind of Islamic liberation theology. “Shariati was our bridge between the ideological reading of Islam and traditional conservative Islam,” Hadian said. In 1973, Shariati was imprisoned by the Shah for two years; he died shortly after he was released, in exile in England, of a heart attack. (Speculation persists that he was murdered by the Shah’s agents.)

After Shariati’s death, Iran’s would-be revolutionaries coalesced around Ayatollah Khomeini. Shariati’s syncretic radicalism was anathema to many of Iran’s traditional mullahs, but Khomeini, who espoused his own version of political Islam, refused to condemn him. Khomeini had been exiled by the Shah in 1964; he fled first to Iraq, and then emerged from years of obscurity when he arrived in France, in late 1978. By then, Iran was in a ferment. Another of Ahmadinejad’s childhood friends, Ahmad Derahvasht, who is now a dentist and lives across the street from Ahmadinejad’s high school, recalled that the two of them used to distribute Khomeini’s clandestine pamphlets on their bicycles.

In an entry on his blog, Ahmadinejad wrote about this era, and his growing feelings of adoration for Khomeini: “The more I became familiar with his thoughts and philosophy, the more affection I had for that divine leader, and his separation and absence was intolerable for me.”

Ahmadinejad blamed “the crapulence of the Shah’s debauched clan” for the impoverishment of Iranians. He singled out the “disgraceful festivals” that the Shah organized in 1971 to celebrate the twenty-five hundred years of Iran’s monarchy. The Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Grace, Imelda Marcos, and Spiro Agnew were among the guests for a three-day celebration. One of the menus featured roast peacock stuffed with foie gras; guests were served a 1911 Moët & Chandon. Because of the Shah’s extravagance, “my father’s sledgehammer and anvil could not cover my family’s necessary expenses . . . and also my educational costs,” Ahmadinejad wrote. While keeping up with his studies, he worked in a shop that sold coolant systems. It was not an easy time, he recalled. “The traitorous Shah and his clan tried to abolish Islamic belief and revolutionary motives among students by propagating immorality, promiscuity, and perversion.” Ahmadinejad implied that he managed to resist these temptations.

On January 16, 1979, the Shah fled the country. On February 1st, Khomeini arrived in Tehran. Street-level Islamic revolutionary committees were formed, armed with weapons from the Shah’s garrisons; Derahvasht said that Ahmadinejad briefly ran his own street committee. The committees were soon absorbed into the police forces, and some of their members, like Ahmadinejad, joined a paramilitary volunteer force called the Basij. Essentially a political home guard, the Basij functions as the social-enforcement arm of the Republican Guard, and has come to serve as an important base of support for Ahmadinejad. Mohammad Atrianfar, an influential publisher, described the Basij to me as “Ahmadinejad’s morality police.” In Khatami’s day, Basij members were used to attack student demonstrators; nowadays, they are less visible, because there is less opposition.

Ahmadinejad also joined a radical student group aligned with Khomeini, the Office for Strengthening Unity between Universities and Theological Seminaries, which led the takeover of the U.S. Embassy. Several former hostages have alleged that Ahmadinejad took part in their capture and interrogation; Ahmadinejad has denied those charges, and former colleagues agree, saying that, in fact, Ahmadinejad was opposed to the Embassy takeover at the time.

Ahmadinejad and Hadian, who had returned from abroad, attended the same mosque in Narmak, which began offering Islamic classes. “Ahmadinejad got me involved in this,” Hadian said. “It seems unbelievable now, but at our ages—we were twenty-two!—we were both teaching. I was teaching about contemporary politics, and he taught religious principles.” In June, 1980, Khomeini closed Iran’s universities so that their staff and curriculums could be purged of “Western and non-Islamic influences”; they were reopened three years later. When the Iran-Iraq War began, in September of that year, Ahmadinejad volunteered. He served in the construction corps.

Ahmadinejad has never been forthcoming about the details of his life, and the nineteen-eighties is a period that remains especially vague. But it is known that he held a number of administrative posts in the province of West Azerbaijan. Along the way, he obtained a bachelor’s degree in engineering. In 1993, he was named governor of Ardabil, a newly created province in northwest Iran. When President Khatami took office, in 1997, he removed him from the governorship, and Ahmadinejad returned to his old university to teach. He received a Ph.D., in traffic management, that year.

“At the university, Ahmadinejad was very active in the Basij organization, and when the reformists came to power in 1997, with Khatami, he used to make problems for the professors and come to class with a kaffiyeh, to show his solidarity with the Palestinian cause,” Hadian said. Ahmadinejad taught at the university until 2003, when Tehran’s city council, then in the hands of a hard-line conservative political faction, named him mayor.

Ahmadinejad and Hadian’s paths had diverged significantly by then. “We remained friends, but we also argued bitterly with one another. It was always like that with us,” Hadian said. He stayed away from Ahmadinejad, so as not to create problems for him. “The people around him either see me as Westernized or else as a spy. He has defended me. But the fact is we are opposed on almost every issue.” Hadian added, “His training as an engineer makes him think that the social world is like the physical world, that you can change it like assembling bricks. It’s not a problem of I.Q., it’s a problem of knowledge and training.”

Ahmadinejad is a Twelver Shiite and a fervent Mahdist, which means that, in the modern Iranian context, he is the equivalent of a born-again Christian. In the Shia tradition, the Twelfth Imam, or the Mahdi, disappeared in the ninth century, hidden by God. His return, together with that of Jesus Christ, will herald an earthly paradise. (In Islam, Christ is regarded as an early prophet.) This explains Ahmadinejad’s evangelizing allusions to the “promised one” when he has addressed the U.N. General Assembly. His public zeal has earned him criticism from Iranians at home, including senior clerics, one of whom scolded him for appearing to claim a special link to the hidden Imam. At the breakfast I attended, Ahmadinejad referred to the Mahdi as “the perfect man.”

A senior Iraqi politician who has met Ahmadinejad a number of times said that, at a meeting in Tehran two years ago, Ahmadinejad spoke about little but the Mahdi. The politician heard from others that Ahmadinejad had blueprints for a planned triumphal superhighway and reception point in Tehran, to be built for the Mahdi’s eventual arrival.

Ahmadinejad’s spiritual mentor is Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, the leader of the ultraconservative Haqqani school. He has advocated political violence against moderates; members of the school have said that they would carry out the 1989 fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie’s death. In 2005, Mesbah-Yazdi ordered his followers to vote for Ahmadinejad—a controversial move, as clerics are expected to abstain from explicit endorsements, even when everyone knows where they stand. (When I asked Shariatmadari, Khamenei’s representative, whether he supported Ahmadinejad’s reëlection bid, he smiled and admonished me, “The Supreme Leader never reveals whom he votes for—not even his children know!”) “Some people think Ayatollah Yazdi formed some kind of a party and trained Ahmadinejad to enter power,” Hojatoleslam Gharavian, an aide to Mesbah-Yazdi, said when we met in the holy city of Qom. “It’s not true. They became close because of their similarity of thinking.”

Gharavian recited Ahmadinejad’s virtues—his modesty, his patriotism, his determination to fight corruption. Another aide, a religious scholar, interjected with a story about how Ahmadinejad, when he was mayor, cleared up a blocked gutter with his own hands. “Just like in ‘Les Misérables,’ ” he said. “Word of this spread everywhere.”

Many educated Iranians I spoke to sought to convince me that Ahmadinejad’s stance on the Holocaust was simply a matter of ignorance. But at high levels of the regime there are many who share or encourage such views. “Anti-Zionism” became part of the official discourse after the Islamic Revolution, and Iran’s Jewish community, which numbered around eighty thousand in the nineteen-seventies, dwindled to twenty thousand, as many of them emigrated. Iranian Jews are allowed to practice their faith, and Jews are represented in parliament, but, under Ahmadinejad, Iran’s official antipathy toward “Zionists” has morphed into something much uglier.

The International Holocaust Cartoon Exhibition opened in Tehran in 2006. Many of the entries depicted Jews with grotesquely long, hooked noses, or as Jewish Nazis. I visited the exhibition and spoke to Shamaqdari, Ahmadinejad’s arts adviser, about it. “What we found out, after over forty countries sent in their contributions, was how similarly people everywhere think,” Shamaqdari said. He showed me a cartoon that he liked. It depicted the “Hollywood” sign, spelled out as “Holocaust.”

This January, a week after Barack Obama’s Inauguration, a conference called “Holocaust? A Sacred Lie by the West” was held in Tehran. Ahmadinejad, in a greeting that he sent to the conference, said that Zionists had “ensnared many politicians and parties.” In a follow-up statement, he added, “An incident known as 9/11 occurred. It is not yet clear who carried it out, who collaborated with them, and who paved the way for them. The event took place, and—like in the case of the Holocaust—they sealed it off, refusing to allow objective research groups to find out the truth.”

I asked Thomas Pickering why Ahmadinejad had chosen that moment to talk so provocatively about the Holocaust. “I think he probably felt encouraged by the Pope,” Pickering replied, referring to the news that week that Benedict XVI had lifted an excommunication order on a British bishop and Holocaust denier. (The Pope later asked the bishop to recant.)

Mohammad Ali Ramin advises Ahmadinejad on the Holocaust and is said to have shaped the President’s views on the subject. One morning this winter, Ramin met me and an interpreter on the campus of the Message of Light University, in Tehran, where he teaches comparative philosophy. We sat outdoors, in a cabana, with cement stools that were made to look like tree stumps. Ramin is a tall man in his fifties, unusually fair for an Iranian, with thinning blond hair and a clipped blond beard. He lived and worked in Germany for many years—as what, he wouldn’t say.

Ramin explained that the prevailing history of the Holocaust was unfair. The West, he said, had transferred its “Jewish problem” to the Middle East. “But it seems that the U.S. and other Western governments have finally decided to get rid of the Jews,” Ramin said. “By bringing Hitler, and by taking the Jews to the Muslim world, they have created a situation in which the Jews will be destroyed. They have created a situation where, because they are killing Palestinians, the Jews are more hated than ever.” He put on his glasses, and, for the first time, met my eyes. “And so you can see that Israel has been created to destroy not only Muslims but the Jews themselves.”

It had grown cold, but Ramin was reluctant to bring us to his office. Finally, looking unhappy, he led us in, glancing around as he entered. As we sat in front of his desk, Ramin informed me that the Jews had carried out the 9/11 attacks. “The Zionists have blamed it on the Muslims so that they have an excuse to attack some Muslim nations,” he said. But it was all for naught. The Jews had also helped Nero, and it had not saved the Roman Empire from collapse.

A large bookcase ran the length of the wall behind Ramin’s desk. A couple of pictures propped up on one of the shelves caught my eye. One was of Imad Mugniyah, the Hezbollah commander, who was killed in a car-bomb explosion in Damascus, in February, 2008. The other depicted a group of men, Orthodox Jews, silhouetted against a yellow background. Loops of Farsi script ran in red across the base of the picture. When Ramin was called to the door for a moment, I asked my interpreter to quickly translate the words on the picture. He said, “It says ‘money-grubbers, bloodsuckers.’ ”

For many Iranians, Ahmadinejad’s ascendance represented the invincibility of clerical rule and the demise of the reformers. “Reformists now have their feet on the ground,” Hamid Reza Jalaipur, a political analyst and a religious reformist, said. “They no longer seek to bring about a secular democracy overnight. There is a new pragmatism.” He added, with a bitter laugh, “Those who are left.”

Iranians are still pushing boundaries in areas other than electoral politics, notably the arts. I saw an exhibition of paintings by a young woman, Sara Dowlatabadi, that focussed on executions in Iran, particularly those of women. Murder, rape, drug trafficking, apostasy, and homosexuality are all punishable by death. (Not that such things are rare: there are an estimated two million heroin and opium addicts in Iran.) Until recently, the condemned were hanged in public, from cranes. In 2008, Iran executed at least three hundred and forty-six people, including eight minors, placing it second in the world, after China. (The United States ranked fifth, with thirty-seven executions.) Last July, twenty-nine prisoners were hanged in a single day at Tehran’s notorious Evin prison.

Dowlatabadi’s paintings were minimalist canvases showing what looked like bunched-up knots, representing people, hanging from ropes. They were interspersed with paintings that seemed to have nothing to do with executions. I learned that they had been arranged that way out of concern for the consequences of being too explicit.

The fear of retaliation is well grounded. In 2003, Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-Canadian photojournalist, was arrested while taking pictures outside Evin prison. She died after nearly three weeks in custody. Initially, the authorities claimed that Kazemi had suffered “a stroke” and an “accidental fall.” A Defense Ministry doctor, who later fled to Canada, said that he had examined Kazemi four days after her arrest, and found that she had been raped and beaten; several of her fingernails had been pulled out and her skull was fractured. Amid an international outcry, an intelligence agent was charged with her “quasi-intentional murder.” He was acquitted when the authorities ruled her death an accident.

Evin is situated in a suburb that borders a popular hiking and picnicking area. A friend drove me along the prison’s brick ramparts one night, under its watchtowers and high dim yellow lights. It is the holding center for thousands of prisoners and the site of unacknowledged massacres with thousands of victims, and of mass graves.

Nasrin Sotoudeh is one of the few human-rights lawyers who operate openly in Iran. I visited her in her tiny office, in an apartment in Yousef Abad, the oldest part of Tehran. On her desk was a bronze figurine of Justice. As we sat down, Sotoudeh removed her head scarf. She is a small woman in her mid-forties, with short dark hair and glasses. In her formless black housecoat, she looked like a nun.

One of Sotoudeh’s clients is a woman who was arrested for going to a meeting about the One Million Signatures Campaign, a petition drive seeking the repeal of the harshest of Iran’s laws discriminating against women. The woman was sentenced to be whipped and to spend two and a half years in prison. Sotoudeh noted that sixty per cent of the university students in Iran today are women, but legally an Iranian woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man. Nine is the age when girls are obliged to begin wearing the hijab, the veil, and that is also when they are susceptible to full punishment under the law. Boys are legally liable at fifteen.

If Ahmadinejad was reëlected in June, Sotoudeh said, it would mean that things would become “much more horrible” than they are today. If a reformist won, it would be better, but she was not expecting “miracles.” She hoped that Iran and the West could resolve their differences, but the prospect of a deal also worried her. “After the nuclear issue was settled between the West and Qaddafi, the human rights of Libyans were left in a state of oblivion,” she said. “For me, the priorities are the rights of Iranian women, of children, and of civil-rights activists.”

In a north Tehran teahouse, I met another of Sotoudeh’s clients, Mansoureh Shojaee, a fifty-year-old former librarian. She had dark hair and wore a colorful striped scarf and a thick red sweater, with large dangling silver earrings—an outfit that, in Iran, was a political statement in itself. Shojaee was deeply involved in the Signatures Campaign, and had been frequently detained, harassed, and interrogated by the police. Her passport had been confiscated. Two years ago, after one of her arrests, Sotoudeh and Shirin Ebadi, Iran’s most famous human-rights activist and the winner of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize, had secured Shojaee’s release from Evin. “They say the Signatures Campaign is an action ‘against national security,’ ” Shojaee said. “I tell my interrogators that I am already fifty years old, and that I’m prepared to spend the next fifty in prison, so I am not afraid.” Shojaee described her situation as a kind of open house arrest, and yet she refused to lie low. “Why should we put ourselves in jail? Let them do it.”

Shojaee despaired at the reformists’ lack of street savvy. “The other day, addressing the fall in oil prices, Ahmadinejad said that he could run Iran even if the price of oil fell to just five dollars a barrel,” she said. The claim was absurd, Shojaee indicated, but it was concise, self-confident, and catchy. “On the same day, Khatami was quoted as saying that ‘the raison d’être of the philosophy of dialogue between civilizations is based upon humanity.’ ” She smiled. “With that kind of gobbledygook, who do you think the ordinary people will vote for?”

Mir-Hossein Mousavi, when announcing his candidacy for the President, said, “Nuclear technology is one of the examples of the achievements of our youth.” Iranian politicians, reformist and conservative alike, share that view. They are proud of their country’s scientists, and believe that Iran should be allowed to possess nuclear energy, if not nuclear weapons. Mohammad Hashemi, a reformist who is the younger brother of former President Ali Akbar Rafsanjani and was a student at Berkeley in the nineteen-seventies, complained to me about a “double standard”: “Why is India allowed nuclear energy, but not Iran?”

I suggested that it might have something to do with Ahmadinejad’s inflammatory rhetoric. Hashemi scoffed. “We have several other leaders,” he said. “In fact, we have several shades of gray, but you just keep going to the black.”

In 2003, Khatami agreed to halt Iran’s efforts to enrich uranium, a process that can yield fuel for a nuclear weapon. At the time, the International Atomic Energy Agency believed that Iran was installing a hundred and sixty centrifuges. In 2006, Ahmadinejad resumed the enrichment, and in April, 2007, I.A.E.A. inspectors confirmed that Iran had thirteen hundred centrifuges; last November, Ahmadinejad announced, jubilantly, that the number was five thousand. “And, if you can operate this many, you can operate sixty thousand,” an international nuclear expert said. (At that level, a nuclear program—whether for civilian or military purposes—becomes viable.) Iran has also increased the range of its missiles. These developments have led to a diplomatic standoff with the European Union and the United States, and subjected Iran to sanctions. Nuclear negotiations have stalled because of the U.S.’s insistence that the Iranians forsake enrichment before talks begin, and also because of the Iranians’ intransigence and evasiveness.

“This is not only Ahmadinejad’s decision,” the nuclear expert said. Even if Ahmadinejad lost the upcoming election, he said, Iran’s uranium-enrichment program would continue. “This is now the No. 1 national issue in Iran. I don’t think anybody can compromise on the nuclear issue now. There is a high ambition by Iranians to global status—not only a nuclear capability. This sort of status means you can go anywhere in the world and you can’t be bought.”

Some experts believe that Iran, whether or not it intends to make a bomb, will have produced enough enriched uranium to do so by the end of this year, although there is disagreement about this in the intelligence community. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s new Prime Minister, has called Iran an “existential threat” to Israel and has said repeatedly that Israel will not allow it to become a nuclear state. Last week, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported, “Politicians in touch with Netanyahu say he has already made up his mind to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations . . . by force, which only Israel is motivated to apply.” Such statements may be part of an effort to lobby the Obama Administration to adopt a tougher approach toward Iran; it is not clear that Israel could launch a successful attack on the nuclear facilities—with air strikes, for instance—without U.S. involvement. Such action seems unlikely, given the Obama Administration’s priorities. That leaves the option of political engagement.

Ali Larijani, a conservative pragmatist and former Presidential candidate who served for two years as Iran’s nuclear negotiator (he is now Speaker of the Majlis), is widely respected at home and abroad; he has written a book about Immanuel Kant. Larijani said that Iran could “come up with a formula that satisfies the international community,” and noted that the Bush Administration had said that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and found none. But he expressed impatience with the members of the Obama team. “On the nuclear issue, they are saying the same things as Bush’s people were,” Larijani said. “It is as if the United States did not want Muslims to have nuclear technology. So it seems that with Obama the colors and tactics, but not the strategies, have changed. There needs to be a new approach, or else nothing much will change. ‘Carrot and stick’ is not the way to talk to Iran.”

Lee Hamilton said that he didn’t believe that “we have resolved or really know” whether the Iranians would actually build a bomb if they had the capacity. But “the core idea of the Bush Administration, which was stopping uranium enrichment as a precondition for talks, was a nonstarter, and Obama seems to have recognized that.” There had to be incentives, he said, and they had to be paired with the threat of sanctions. “You need skillful diplomacy, but you cannot forgo the points of leverage.” Hamilton had heard that the U.S. had a number of covert operations in place against Iran; he mentioned programs of “currency manipulation and disinformation,” which he thought might have a use. But, he said, “if they are military or paramilitary covert actions, and aimed at regime change, I think that should be put aside. Regime change should be put aside, but our policy can encourage behavioral change; that’s the line I would draw.

“On our side, the rhetoric has to change—less bellicose language from us will help,” Hamilton continued. “No President is going to take the military option off the table. But talking about it less will help.”

In a press conference on March 24th, President Obama spoke of a “philosophy of persistence,” which he applied to both the economic crisis and to relations with Iran. “We did a video sending a message to the Iranian people and the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And some people said, ‘Well, they did not immediately say they were eliminating nuclear weapons and stop funding terrorism,’ ” Obama said. “Well, we didn’t expect that. We expect that we’re going to make steady progress on this front.”

“We always knew it was not going to be easy with Iran,” Vali Nasr said. “There are too many issues, too many parallel authorities, no track record, and no trust. There have been no relations for thirty years, and there is not intimate knowledge of the actors on the other side.”

The next steps will likely be coördinated by Dennis Ross, the State Department’s veteran Middle East negotiator, who has been named Secretary of State Clinton’s special adviser on Iran. One place to start is Afghanistan, where Iran has a great deal of influence in the northern and western regions. At the conference in The Hague last week, the Iranians pledged to help combat the Afghan drug trade, which, as Clinton told reporters afterward, “is a worry that the Iranians have, which we share.”

Thomas Pickering praised Obama’s approach so far, but cautioned that there was no way to predict if it would bear fruit. “I am trying to be as hard-nosed in my assessments as possible,” Pickering said. “But I have always believed that, if there is an unopened door in a room, then you should try it.” ♦

Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer, began contributing to The New Yorker in 1998.